The title piece, where Jamison describes being a medical actor training doctors through simulated exams, also presents the collection’s philosophical underpinnings. She explains, “Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion,” and having “empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges,” because “trauma bleeds.”

Jamison adheres to this idea throughout the book, whether she’s interviewing an acquaintance in prison for mortgage fraud (“Fog Count”) or following runners in the Barkley Marathons, a Tennessee race that “only eight men have ever finished” (“The Immortal Horizon”).

In “Devil’s Bait,” Jamison attends a conference for people suffering from Morgellons disease, a skin condition some doctors see as an incurable illness and others classify as a delusion.

In these pieces, Jamison considers our “prerequisites for suffering” and whether we can have empathy when we “trust the fact of suffering, but not the source.”

Her intelligent book shows us that, along with requiring that we ask “the questions whose answers need to be listened to,” being empathetic means “acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Reviews of five other noteworthy paperbacks:

The Natural Order of Things

Kevin P. Keating

(Vintage, 304, $14.95)

Keating teaches English at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, Lorain County Community College and Lakeland Community College. His novel-in-stories was originally published as a print-on-demand book through Aqueous Books in 2012, but after the book became a finalist for a Los Angeles Times prize for debut fiction, it gained new life being picked up and published by Vintage.

Set around a Jesuit prep school located in a decaying Midwestern city – think St. Ignatius, from which Keating graduated in 1989 – the 15 stories here go dark quickly.

“Vigil” follows William, a student who frequents a prostitute he has come to regard “as a kind of secular saint, one who is generous with her body to the point of martyrdom.”

In “Box,” a brewery deliveryman, the father of the school’s quarterback, contends with the decaying state of his marriage. Measured against the life-sized cardboard cheerleaders he posts at beer displays along his route, his wife has “ceased to be a woman who could make him howl with yearning and deep desire.”

Marriage “has turned her into a shapeless, fleshy hermaphrodite,” and though he has contemplated leaving her, “like most men who are out of money and out of options, he is afraid to take action.”

Reviewing Keating’s book for The Plain Dealer, Kristin Ohlson felt that the stories “would have been improved with a less-jaundiced eye, one that caught the shades between black and white.”

Ohlson criticized the stories for being “riddled with an unfortunate array of stereotypical characters and prose as purple as a priest’s robes at Easter Mass. The priests are malevolent shadows, the richest alumnus is a debauchee, the cabdriver is a font of banal wisdom, the poets are vapid windbags. With the exception of a nice barista, the women are there to eat the men’s hearts out.”

Other critics, however, had much more positive reactions to Keating’s work. In Cleveland Magazine, Barry Goodrich found “The Natural Order of Things” to be “a darkly brilliant, sometimes disturbing odyssey that lays bare the human condition.”

In a starred review for Booklist, Daniel Kraus observed that “the wrong reader who picks this up won’t have to read long before hurling it across the room.” As Kraus explained, “This is Peyton Place sunk a few rungs lower in hell” – and, “packed with depravity like a bloated corpse about to burst, the book could easily be written off as sadistic or hateful. But if you look at Keating’s debut as a sort of horror anthology – no supernatural here, but plenty of monsters – each lurid shock becomes all the more impressive.”

As in his other work, Rash’s latest collection of stories excels in its depiction of Appalachian life, though in these 14 stories, Rash offers a few more comedic twists to balance out the tragedy.

In “A Sort of Miracle,” an accountant named Denton begins experiencing problems in the bedroom with his wife after her two layabout brothers move in. Rather than go to a doctor for help, Denton visits a Chinese herbalist who tells him that a cure requires the gall bladder and paws of a bear.

While bear hunting presents dangers, it seems to be better than “having to explain to a doctor and then after that having to take the prescription to a pharmacy where some eighteen-year-old cashier would stop chewing her bubble gum just long enough to do something stupid like say your name and the name of what you are picking up out loud, maybe even say it out loud over a speaker like it was a frigging pep rally.”

The collection’s closing story, “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” is a small piece of meditative beauty as Carson, a recently widowed retired veterinarian, makes an early morning house call to help a friend with “a calf that ain’t of a mind to get born.”

Even now, four months after his wife’s death, moments pass each morning as Carson sits up on the mattress and settles his bare feet on the floor before he realizes that he is “waiting for another body to do the same thing, leave the bed, and fix him a thermos of coffee.” Other times, “he’d read something and lower the newspaper, about to speak to an empty chair, or at the grocery store, reach into a shirt pocket for a neatly printed list that wasn’t there.”

In The New York Times, Janet Maslin explained that she found the book to be “excitingly versatile, covering time periods from the Civil War to the present and ranging in mood from wryly comic to brutal.”

Still, she observed that the stories of Rash’s collection are united by a “haunting evanescence” and “clean, tough specificity, courtly backwoods diction, and a capacity for sending shivers.”

Writing for the Boston Globe, Matthew Gilbert also praised “Rash’s lovely, essential new collection,” noting that Rash is at “a peak of control and insight. He specifically captures the Southern idiom and Appalachian regional sensibility beautifully, from the Civil War through the 1920s and 1960s to now, but there are always human beings behind the accents.”

For Gilbert, “There’s an art to exclusion, to what a writer decides to leave out of sentences and story lines. Ron Rash is a careful master of that art, withholding key facts and actions so that the reader must fill them in.”

As Gilbert explained, “Rash isn’t delivering puzzles, by any means; his prose is elegant, suggestive, and Hardyesque.” But “his openings don’t fully spell out the who and the where; he doesn’t provide establishing shots. Nor does he explain his characters. And the resolutions of scenes, and of entire stories, tend toward ellipsis, a carefully gauged ambiguity that can leave the reader retracing events in active thought: What really just happened?”

That ambiguity extends to Rash’s characters, as “we don’t quite know who the good guys are as ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ gracefully moves from tale to tale, or even if there are any good guys. Among the thieves, condescending academics, drug addicts, and gamblers, there are moments of humanity, but they are fleeting.”

For Gilbert, Rash’s work coalesces as a book that is “lyrical and honest, grounded in place yet sweeping in scope.”

Margaret Fuller

Megan Marshall

(Mariner, 474 pp., $16.95)

Marshall subtitles her biography of Margaret Fuller “A New American Life.” Fuller is best known for her pioneering work as a feminist, her association with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other members of the Transcendentalist movement in the 19th century and for her tragic death at age 40 in a shipwreck that also claimed her husband and young son.

As Marshall explains, Fuller “was always mindful of her own extraordinary capabilities,” and “this awareness was a source of frequent inner turmoil as she strove to realize her talents in an era unfriendly to openly ambitious women.”

Fuller’s work led to her becoming the first woman granted access to the library at Harvard College, the inaugural editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, and the first female correspondent for The New York Tribune, where “she turned out editorials and cultural commentary aimed at shaping the opinions of her fifty thousand readers on subjects from literature and music to Negro voting rights and prison reform.”

Plain Dealer reviewer Bob Hoover found Marshall’s book to be an “exhaustive – and exhausting – examination of the mind and heart of Margaret Fuller.”

Hoover thought “Marshall’s dutiful biography” provides “a largely static portrait of Fuller” that “reaches full sail itself in relating Fuller’s final years after many pages adrift.”

However, in the Boston Globe, Kate Tuttle came away much more impressed as she observed that “Marshall’s sympathy for Fuller – for the dilemma she faced as a powerfully intelligent woman whose time and place repeatedly thwarted her ambitions – nearly outpaces her admiration, though the book passionately evokes both. Fuller, so often misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints.”

Like Hoover, Tuttle was impressed most by the chapters considering the end of Fuller’s life, where “Marshall most ardently argues for our reappraisal of a woman inadequately remembered as too smart, too bossy, ill-tempered. Fuller’s Marshall, seen in the round, was flawed and human and magnificent.”

“Having grown to know the woman Marshall so stirringly portrays,” Tuttle concluded, “it’s impossible not to mourn her early death.”

The End of Power

Moisés Naím

(Basic, 306 pp., $16.99)

Naím, whose career history includes being Venezuela's minister of development and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine, offers a book subtitled “From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be.”

Naím begins by explaining his “most profound insight” from his experiences in Venezuela concerning “the enormous gap between the perception and the reality” of his power.

As Naím observes, “In principle, as one of the main economic ministers, I wielded tremendous power. But in practice, I had only a limited ability to deploy resources, to mobilize individuals and organizations, and, more generally, to make things happen. My colleagues and even the president had the same feeling, though we were loath to acknowledge that our government was a hobbled giant.”

In short, Naím concludes, the “decay of power” means that “power no longer buys as much as it did in the past. In the twenty-first century, power is easier to get, harder to use – and easier to lose.”

As a result, he says, “today’s power players often pay a steeper and more immediate price for their mistakes than did their predecessors. Their response to that new reality, in turn, is reshaping the behavior of those over whom they have power, setting in motion a chain reaction that touches every aspect of human interaction.”

In Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry explained that while he was convinced by Naím’s argument that “that the ability of elites to use their assets to influence and shape the world has dissipated,” he was less swayed by “the argument that power itself is slipping away or disappearing.”

For Ikenberry, “What Naím shows, rather, is that power now manifests itself in new ways and places. New technologies and novel social groupings have allowed inventors, activists, terrorists, and many other types of people to exercise more influence. Naím might overstate the significance of this change, but his book should provoke a debate about how to govern the world when more and more people are in charge.”

Ordinary Grace

William Kent Krueger

(Atria, 307 pp., $16)

Krueger, best known for his Cork O’Connor crime series, offers a literary coming-of-age novel reminiscent of Larry Watson’s “Montana 1948.”

Set in New Bremen, Minn., in 1961, when narrator Frank Drum is 13, “Ordinary Grace” opens elegiacally. While the summer includes the debut season for the Minnesota Twins, for Frank, the time is marked by death.

As he tells readers, “All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota.”

During the summer, Frank goes on to say, “Death, in visitation, assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.”

For Frank, though, memories of the summer aren’t weighed down by tragedy. Rather, evoking Aeschylus for his notion that pain “falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God,” Frank concludes that the summer is about “the terrible price of wisdom” and the “awful grace of God” that accompanies it.

Writing for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Carole E. Barrowman called “Ordinary Grace” a “touching coming-of-age novel about family, faith and the empathy that can come from a violent loss.”

For Barrowman, the novel offers “a story told in sepia tones. Like looking at old photographs in a family album, Krueger’s descriptions and details evoke a past tinged with sadness but colored with hope.”

While she saw some comparisons to Stephen King’s novella “The Body” (the basis of Rob Reiner’s 1986 movie “Stand By Me”), she noted that “King’s story has four boys at its center,” while “Krueger has created a cast of compelling characters (young and old), each in his or her own way searching for something.”

She acknowledged that “Krueger’s plot rises to a predictable conclusion,” but went on to say, “There’s such a quiet beauty in his prose and such depth to his characters that I was completely captivated by this book’s ordinary grace.”

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